Brokencyde’s new music video, “Freaxxx,” has been making the critical rounds, taking its first bashing at The Stranger’s Slog, and another lickin’ on Videogum. I’ve imbedded the video below in hopes of inspiring a few more reader submissions for Washington City Paper’s year-end music video write-up.

Brokencyde - Freaxxx (Music Video) from Eat Cake Films on Vimeo.

Brokencyde is a popular act in the growing genre of screamo electronica. Mark Athitakis hates them. You probably will, too. I’m tempted to give them the same treatment that I did a similar act, but I kind of like them (especially their screamo cover of Flo Rida’s “Low”). Despite being vapid and generic, the music is fun and the screaming is top-notch.

And seeing as my iTunes library is 65% emo (think Brand New & TBS, not Rites of Spring), one could successfully argue that I’d be heaving stones from the parapet atop my glass mansion.

Feel free to unleash your anti-screamo/crunk invective in the comments.

No matter how you approach it critically, Scott Weiland’s sophomore solo album “Happy” in Galoshes sounds phoned in. From the uninspired and uninspiring acoustic guitar on “Killing me Sweetly” to the arena-rock shit-fest “Missing Cleveland” (Who knew Cleveland was a city worth missing?), “Happy” is just plain bad.

As an STP fan–I loved Sarah Michelle Gellar in the “Sour Girl” music video and the balls-to-the-wall riffage on “Wicked Garden”–I find Weiland’s new dreck offensive, especially since I did him a favor by quietly ignoring his first solo effort. My advice to Weiland is that he start shooting up again, bring back his clean indie-ish vocals circa 1999, gather up the DeLeo brothers and Eric Kretz, and get to work on that new STP album.

For your listening displeasure, 56 seconds of “Missing Cleveland”:

There is some dispute over what M83’s Anthony Gonzalez just told us. His four-piece band clanged the final chord of “Graveyard Girl,� and he admitted something into the mic—his first banter of the night! But what did he say?

“Yes, I was that guy,� says a kid in a tight polo shirt. “That’s what he said.�

“Seriously?� says his pal. This is a depressing concept. “Graveyard Girl� is a deeply weird and sad song about a teenager with mood swings. The only man in the song is Death. Death, we’re told, is “her boyfriend.�

“You have to listen through the French accent.�

Almost nothing that Gonzalez said or sang was comprehensible, but that isn’t important to the sound or act of M83. His whispered, Jacques Chirac-thick vocals are a relatively new addition to the band’s electronic drone. The old songs, the ones that predate 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us, begin with some simple figure, no more than four or five notes, played rapidly and hypnotically one of Gonzalez’s synthesizers. The piling-on starts. Sometimes it’s a distorted guitar that comes in, sometimes it’s another synth pattern, sometimes it’s a context-free movie soundtrack (always a voice sounding terrified, breathing heavily, like the guy who says “It’s in the trees!� at the start of “Hounds of Love�).

Either you’re hypnotized or you’re not. The heavy crowd at The Black Cat split into the hypnotized and the mildly amused, with the former gaining more and more recruits as the night went on. The band killed it on “Teen Angst,� a silver bullet of song from that 2005 record that stacks drums on synths on drums on husky female vocals. When it ended, a voice near the front of the stage started to crack. “Oh, god!� People near him laughed. “Oh, god, oh my god!� It was good, yeah, but that good? Meg Ryan in a diner good?

M83 are noisy enough and repetitive enough to sound like a post-rock band, and they’re French, so you could call them Frogwai and probably get away with it. Listened to at length, in a dark club, in a neighborhood where people come to concerts in order to not dance, it starts to sound more recognizable. It’s goth for people with a sense of decorum. When the band works into a long song like “Couleurs,� they can watch the front rows’ low-impact dance—Nod your head! Buckle your knees! Bend your waist slightly! —pick up speed and spread around the room. The pop songs from the band’s new record Saturdays=Youth sound like classic Cure singles, and the Black Cat dances to them the way it dances to “Just Like Heaven� when it cues up on the club’s frequent 80s nights.

M83 were preceded by School of Seven Bells, an NPR-ready band finally reveal what would have happened if the twin ghost girls from The Shining spent their adolescence listening to Psychocandy. Benjamin Curtis (he of Secret Machines) anchors this band, and sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza do everything hauntingly—play guitar, play the synthesizer, harmonize dark lyrics. They played a short set longer on drone than songs, but it worked, and it complemented M83 perfectly. No one could have liked one band and disliked the other. This isn’t an exciting niche, or a new one, but if the world must contain indie goth it should always be so melodic.

Is this a typo on the Black Cat site, or are they being serious? I just did a triple-take, clicked on the links from the schedule a few times to make sure, and apparently it’s legit: Robert Pollard’s Boston Spaceship will be playing the mainstage on Saturday evening, supported by Detroit popsters The High Strung, and Miami noise-punk scoundrels Laundry Room Squelchers.

No, I’m not a Guided By Voices fanboy geekin’ over another Bob Pollard incarnation; the real cause for excitement (well, for me) is the presence of Miami-based madman Rat Bastard’s nebulous Squelchers unit, one of the most unpredictable outfits in all of noise’s underbelly. A founding member of the despicable To Live and Shave in LA, Mr. Bastard (Frank Falestra to Mom) has been cracking heads, bursting eardrums, and causing structural damage in shitty clubs for decades, most recently with his sprawling International Noise Conference, which touts: “No droning, no mixing boards, no laptops.”

I had the opportunity to see the Squelchers at last year’s No Future Fest in Chapel Hill, NC, where a burly man with black-rimmed glasses and beanie (Rat Bastard) hurled his static-spewing amplifier into the faces and chests of audience members. It looked something like this:

You can imagine my intrigue then, at the juxtaposition of such confrontational guitar trash and hook-laden pop-punk for Saturday’s bill, though it makes a bit more sense after some Googling and a visit to the Squelchers site. Pollard and Finestra have actually collaborated before — back in 2003 for Pollard’s Motel of Fools EP. And since the “Laundry Room Squelchers” are basically anyone who can/will tour with Mr. Bastard at the time, the lineup for Saturday will consist solely of Finestra and local guitar/electronics whiz Chris Grier, also a collaborator with TLASILA. Given that this is basically an indie rock showcase, I imagine the Squelchers set will be significantly less violent and involve a more stationary guitar assault similar to this:

But you never know, heads might roll.

The opener for Built to Spill and the Meat Puppets last night at the 9:30 Club was the Drones, a noise-rock quartet from Melbourne, Australia. The audience loved them; I’d never heard of them. Nor did I love them. Too much of what I heard last night was just noise, plain and simple.

I’m not anti-noise by any means. I have those requisite Sonic Youth albums; I’ve seen shows at 611 Florida; hell, I used to have my CD player/alarm clock set so that I woke up to Lightning Bolt’s Wonderful Rainbow. But The Drones’ stage set last night wasn’t noise in the “experimental” sense, or even the “confrontational” sense. It may have been “passionate,” at least on the distributing end, but the passion wasn’t terribly contagious. No, it was noise for noise’s sake, just another layer to the arrangement that didn’t have any purpose other than to fill out the sound. I’m not sure why, since some of the songs weren’t too bad by themselves (the last one, whose title I know not, was actually pretty good).

But while I start in again to bashing myself for getting old, I’ll also point out that Built to Spill kicked ass playing Perfect From Now On, and though the BTS-loving friend who accompanied me will surely disagree, the Meat Puppets stole the show.

“Prolific” is almost an understatement when speaking of Los Angeles-based John Wiese’s absurd body of work in the realm of confrontational electronics and subterranean weirdness. Check his page on Discogs, or browse his bio on Wikipedia for a look at his impressive resume, which boasts ongoing mayhem through Sissy Spacek and LHD among collaborations with the top names in the noise game: Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Bastard Noise, Lasse Marhaug, and Sunn O))). His most recent release even chronicles two improvised live sets with Burning Star Core’s violinist extraordinaire, C Spencer Yeh. But as his extensive solo output proves, Wiese is much more than just a noise-gun for hire. His 2007 full-length, Soft Punk, was an opus of mangled punk rock bathed in digital deterioration—a taste of the laptop deconstructions he regularly displays onstage.

Equally exciting for the night is Bulbs, a duo comprised of San Fran residents William Sabiston (ex-Axolotl) and John Alamraz. Their sound could be likened to the gnarlier side of Black Dice’s techno perversions fed through dismantled punk ramblings and lysergic rattles. They’ve got a relatively new record called Light Ships out on Freedom To Spend, the newly-conceived label from Pete Swanson of the now defunct Yellow Swans. Foxy Digitalis has a pretty decent review of the record that’s worth reading. I’m particularly interested to see how these two manifest themselves live; hopefully, their borderless gurgles will solidify a tad for entertainment’s sake.

Local jams will be provided by Kuschty Rye Ergot, the nebulous psych-ensemble led by area multi-instrumentalist John Stanton. Rounding out the bill is Fairfax-based Nick Henry’s Silvum moniker, bringing frigid drone lurches to dip your toes into. Sounds like a promising showcase for those with a taste for the abrasive, cosmic, and bizarre. If that sounds a little too harsh for your mellow, then maybe you should play it safe and see Pineapple Express for the third time instead.

Photo of Weise by Dustin Fenstermacher